skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This has some very neat advantages, the largest being that no one entity controls Bitcoin, instead it is a community all agreeing to use a currency with particular rules, with some clever algorithms keeping everybody honest. No single government, much less corporation, can dictate what happens to Bitcoins."

- I'm not sure about the construct of your argument. It appears that this is indeed the biggest disadvantage with Bitcoin, not an advantage. The very thing holding back adoption of Bitcoin is this sense that there is no single entity that can ensure the offering functions as hoped.

I wonder if Bitcoin isn't the Napster and somewhere out there is a Steve Jobs ready to launch an iTunes version.....
Event: Music Hackathon in Austin this weekend (10/6-10/7)
> But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.

2.5 yrs out of college. Code monkey. Really, really good at monkey programming. Used to get upset when people made claims that it can't or shouldn't be done. "Of course it can be done you lazy #$%*$%. You call yourself a software engineer??" Then I pull it off. A couple more people love me, a couple more hate me. I become the monkey programmer. I am the one who brings designs to life the quickest.

That's the gist, and it's getting old. Requirements change. Social issues. It's like trying to drive a ferarri up switchbacks of a mountain. No wonder companies love hiring new grads.

The largest benefit from this is: reading & writing a lot of code. There is no substitute for this. It has helped me identify design areas that I need experience with. It has also helped me reason about code more efficiently, which is a very useful skill when interacting with other programmers.

Edit: And then I go home and read HN and /r/programming and play with other programming languages and build stupid little programs and read my books and try to figure out my next move...
Republicans Run Pirate Bay Skyscraper Ad Campaign
Sounds like a huge oportunity for an online escrow business.
We're just starting as a competitor (www.Staff.com) and kind of starting in the same way by helping companies to find staff with personal interaction. The competitive advantage that we are focussing on is:
1. Focus on full time hires with technology and staff that are oriented to working full time for one company. One of the issues with oDesk is that great freelancers are in high demand working for several clients and so are not focussed on your work. On the other side of the coin, most freelancers on the platform do not earn enough to make ends meet, because they only get a couple of jobs for $2 per hour to try and get started and they never get traction
2. More of a managed solution where we help companies to find the right staff member. This is possible because we are focussed only on full time hires.

Then as a second stage of the business build a platform that has some advantages over oDesk and other existing remote staffing platforms.
> Bitcoin is no more a "den of thieves" than a cash-based society, which most of the world was until recently.

Actually it seems that credit/debt was usually the standard and not cash per se, at least if David Graeber's book on the history of debt can be believed ("Debt: The First 5,000 Years"). While cash has certainly been used since antiquity, most transactions were on credit, even before Western Europe exited the Middle Ages, with cash limited to certain purposes and/or segments of society.
I'm not complaining. :)
"It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand."

Hrm... it's like that for me, but it's not like that for others I know. Some people I know have worked in the same industry for several years and have a good grasp on the problem domains they address. That doesn't mean they know the solution to everything off the top of their head, but it does mean they'll likely have time to figure it out, as they're in that business for the long term, and have incentives to get it right vs 'fire and forget and move to the next project'.

I'm in my 40s and have been programming, for 30 years. Initially as a hobby (obviously) but getting paid to do it, first part time, then full time, for about 20 years. I had this same conversation with an uncle last year - shouldn't I be doing something else (OK, not quite the same tone as the OP, but we had the discussion).

I have skills that allow me to solve problems for people. Many people do as well, but with software, I do it with electrons, and can do it wherever and whenever I want. In contrast to many other types of work which dictate location, tools, timing, software work is incredibly flexible. But... more to the point, as more of the world continues to become software-based, the opportunities to offer my problem-solving skills to people increases at a rate few other industries/skills have enjoyed (or will continue to enjoy).

Even if I switched focus to work in "company X" vs "company Y", my core ability will still be "problem solving with software" - I just don't see that changing for me over the next 20-30 years. The 'how' and 'who' may change, but probably not the 'what' so much.
I suppose there is the possibility of a hacker changing their actual content so that things AREN'T done client side, and therefore being able to decrypt the keys. In that case any user who used their site with that malicious code would be compromised.

That is a very real threat, I grant you that, but it is a hell of a lot better than what the state of the art was a year ago when a hacker got everybody's information once they got root.
We get these in the UK all the time. Usually either try and hold them on the line as long as possible (if bored) or tell them to "fuck off" straight away.
> This is a good thing.

Why do you say so, apart from ideology? The history of money and credit transactions suggests the opposite; consumers in fact clamor for transactions to be reversible. Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
I've been doing software development for a total of 16 years, with a stint as an IT manager for 5 additional. Did some side work here and there to keep skills sharp, but I recently got back into full-time development after I realized I like creating more than I like maintaining.

I'll be 42 in November, and my experience gives me a guided path to understanding and solving problems, independent of technology, language or API.

I don't need to chew through espresso and lattes until 2am, because I've gotten smarter over time. I can identify patterns and problems faster than I did 20 years ago. I work more efficiently and don't need to take a scatter-shot, unfocused approach to work.

I don't disagree that software is a continual source of frustration to develop, but I think that's because we expect at some point to be super-experts for any problem domain.

Yes, tools and frameworks change. Sometimes they suck. Sometimes they don't. If you don't love learning new things and investing yourself in continually keeping up to date, then you doom yourself to being miserable in this profession at any age.
Fool me once, shame on you..

Fool me five times?
Make an Impact with Amicus (YC S12)
Had it happen to many people I know. They only were successful with one person I know - they replaced her OEM Windows XP license with a pirated/fake one...then stole the original perhaps? Can't imagine how useful an OEM XP license to a Acer POS netbook would be valuable.

If you get one of these calls, just screw with them - pretend you are following their instructions for as long as possible before saying "Ubuntu doesn't have that."
I made a tl;dr version for people who don't have time to read the whole thing: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506d8edd78b3cba85f000416
Maybe advantage is the wrong word, maybe it is just what makes Bitcoin even possible.

Centralized digital currencies (eGold?) have been around, but their problem is twofold in that they are more vulnerable to single points of attack and more importantly, can be shut down by governments.

I don't know if there have been any real efforts yet to crack down on Bitcoin but it seems well positioned to survive such an attempt.
Please, this is how you execute this idea......http://cowbird.com. I did not sign up because i have no idea what the product does and the alternate to Facebook login blends into the background and is hard to notice.
> using them is the epitome of laziness

I think you meant 'writing them'. Reading, debugging and understanding them is often soul-crushing.
Neural Networks officially best at object recognition in this particular competition of seven teams, on two of the three tasks.

Not to take away from the accomplishment of the SuperVision team, but claim in the title seems somewhat sensationalist. Is this competition like the world cup of object recognition or something?
I use the "I'll just go and get the PC owner ... he's at the bottom of the garden". Then put the phone on mute. My personal record is getting them to hang on for 5 minutes.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/online-privacy/phish...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/securitytipstalk/archive/2010/03/09/...
It reads like a history book to me, or a collection of legends, rather than a traditional story arc. I enjoyed the Silmarillion, but more like one would enjoy reading about the rise and fall of the Roman empire than reading fiction. It was more of a learning experience. It also made LOTR a lot richer when I went back and read it again.
That's a very interesting problem Trifacta is trying to solve, I could have used it in my former job!

The article itself is a bit long, so I made a summary: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506d8f1a78b3cba85f000477
Problems like this are vexing, even to us non-Indians in the US. I've had the privilege of working with some awesome engineers from around the world, but issues of this ilk taint the opinions of many folks in IT and CS. It's bad enough that these assumptions hurt the careers of truly talented and dedicated engineers and programmers.
I often see aged programmers are more tolerant with things they dont like,as they know most jobs are just boring from their years of working experience. Lots of them think job is just for paying the bill.
It seems like this could be a good use case for geofences.
We're the Michelangelos of the great age of machine intelligence which is yet to come.

If there's a great age of machine intelligence to come, then one in a million of us may be a Michelangelo. The rest of us are house-painters, and the houses we paint are slated for demolition within our own lifetimes.
The Argentine government is getting desperate at the moment. They've started fiddling their inflation figures, [1] and they've had to take steps to stop people converting all their savings into dollars. On top of that, they've added in some populist sabre rattling over the Falklands to try and distract everyone.

[1] http://www.rssenews.org.uk/2012/02/economist-magazine-drops-...
It seems they have gotten wise to this recently, I've heard a few stories about them being quite nasty if you do this. Anecdotally, this was on my Facebook feed yesterday (NSFW language): http://i.imgur.com/buv06.png
Alas, the one I got a few weeks ago hung up on me when, after trying to get me to say what version of Windows I was running, I asked, "what's a, an 'operating system'?"

Obviously there's a fine line to tread between playing dumb enough to keep them on the hook and playing too dumb to be useful.

(Haven't had one of them call since, alas: refining your technique is hard if you don't get enough practice calls.)
> Really? That's the direction you took? You realize what Tesla is doing is going to destroy the oil economy - dependency on oil for cars - and practically eliminate the need to pay for re-fueling your car once you own it? Or is it that you just don't believe it?

Calm down:)

All I was responding to was a couple of comments about working for below average wages, bad work environment and the performance of Tesla's stock, which has been a bit disappointing over the past year.

I do think that Tesla will become profitable, but I don't' think for a second that it will "destroy the oil economy".

And consider for a second this statement:
> "practically eliminate the need to pay for re-fueling your car"

I don't' think Tesla has any such goal, as far as I know they still require you to refuel your car by plugging it into an electricity source. Electricity is literally the new fuel source.

How are you imagining that this is going away? Or are you using fuel in a narrow manner to refer to only oil based fuel?
Does being bald bump up your business image?
> pretend you are following their instructions for as long as possible

It's not just fun, it's a very responsible thing to do. Every minute they spend with you is a minute they don't spend screwing over someone else.

But don't end with "Ubuntu doesn't have that" or "I only have a Mac, sorry" or some other snarky comment. Just fake stupidity until they give up. They are constantly tuning their scams based on successful and unsuccesful cons, and if they realize you're screwing with them they'll just filter you out of that. Or worse, they'll realize that "calling from the windows" tipped you off and change it to "Microsoft Support Associate" or something.

If you instead come across as someone who believes the "calling from windows" bit, but for some reason aren't able to open the remote control software ("i try to download it but the screen moves?" or "when i click RUN, it says dotnet could not complete the operation?"), you will reinforce the stupid parts of the scam, and possibly have them waste time trying to research the technical difficulty you "experienced".
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't actually read the article.
Svgs are cool, but icon fonts are just 10% of their file size
I'm familiar with your history on HN and your work with open source and appreciate both, so please do not take offense to this.

You are completely and totally wrong about everything you just said. I run a business and every client signs a contract agreeing to mandatory binding arbitration. Why? Court cases are expensive, and most of my clients are attorneys themselves or have significantly more resources than I do.

Both sides agree on an arbitrator and each side pays 50% of the fee. Arbitration is not some back room circle jerk where the defendant gives the arbitrator a couple hundred bucks for a favorable ruling, and the notion that it is is offensive to people like me who rely on that option. And guess what? If the arbitration was like that, you're within your right to sue.
Or the client-side computer gets hacked and the attacker gets the passphrase with a keylogger.
I'm not exactly disagreeing but just curious:

1. How can a non-RFC-compliant email be valid?

2. What about compiled regexes, performance-wise?

3. Sometimes a regex is faster than the overhead of a parser, so wouldn't the choice be dependent on context? In other words, regexes are not always slower, true?

4. Wouldn't some abstraction libraries utilize regexes under the hood? Would that be wrong in your view?

P.S. Some languages allow the option for very readable regexes, e.g. separate each component on its own line, with a comment.
Note: pricing info is not published. So they changed an accurate link title 'request quote' - which tells people they'll need to fill in details to find out pricing - to an inaccurate one 'request pricing' which wont actually give the user what they want (prices). So the click through rate increased, but did any more people actually fill in the get-a-quote form? I'm guessing not.
That's a fair point. The difference is in where I think the trust should be placed.

I would love to be able to pay for goods on Amazon with bitcoin, because I trust Amazon. Right now Mastercard/Visa/Paypal takes a cut on each of those transactions to provide "trust" in them that I neither need nor want. If things go wrong in that transaction, I'm still left dealing with Amazon, as Mastercard/Visa/Paypal will not want to get involved.

In cases where you're dealing with an unknown quantity, then you have to look elsewhere for your trust metric. eBay has their, eg. "99% positive" reviews, Silk Road has their own way of dealing with this (similar with freebies/samples to build trust).
How many of them buy something from/via Facebook?
And yet they're missing the real probable truth here: when I ignore a 'request quote' and click a 'request price' it's because I don't want to waste thirty minutes with an agent AT ANY POINT in the transaction. I want a set price. I want to buy now from you, or from someone else. But I want hard information right now.
Having done my time in the tech support trenches, I do one hell of an "end user" impersonation. I held one of these guys on the line for 1 hour 20 minutes one evening, then told him my phone was dying and that I'd need to call him back. I called back two days later and tied him up for another 20 minutes before he finally cracked and hung up on me.

Yes, it was a terrific waste of time, but boy did it feel good. I consider it volunteering. All the time I spent on the phone with the scammer was time they couldn't spend targeting vulnerable individuals.
Bitcoin is something basic and should not be taken for more. What banks and other services do nowadays is something far more complex, including leveraging trust in a way or another. These kind of services can be built on top of BitCoin. Their business models won't be equivalent in all aspects with what we have now in the current system, but there is enough room and potential for such services to exist/run covering needs. It will be just a better system regarding the corruptible nature, because there won't be an central authority with whom to strike deals under the table and get empowered to "be a necessary evil".
Got the call from these guys a few weeks ago - actually about 20 calls. I finally picked up and kept the guy on for about 10 minutes asking him progressively dumber questions. Finally, I told him I was running OSX, which led him to call his manager. The manager had a really hard time understanding that I wasn't running Windows. It did not sit with his worldview at all.
This is good news for Steam.
Yes, maybe it's "Bitcoin has some very unique characteristics that are either it's biggest advantages or drawbacks, depending on your point of view" Full disclosure. I work for a payments startup. We have a tug of war around Bitcoin. We're fascinated by it's potential but also fear tying our brand too closely to it as it seems to receive bad press around something every 90 days.
The message being: Governments, pay your debts.
For those not familiar with the term "Vulture Fund", there is some background at the following links:

Cashing in on the crash
http://www.economist.com/node/9687782

Vulture funds – how do they work?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/nov/15/vul...
Thats the trick I use, or pretend you are old and on a bad line. The latter gives them the impression that you're easy money.
Most of my experience has been in product-focused teams, so there is a good mixture of R&D and polish work. The company as a whole has to spend time convincing customers that our product is useful, but the development team is able to focus on actually making a useful product.

I can see how what you're saying could be a much bigger problem in a project-focused organization (or if you're working on a product that isn't actually useful). So maybe my advice is twofold: "find a good manager and stay with them, and work for a company that values software for its long-term potential."
The DMCA stipulates punishments for malicious claims, but not stupid ones. Proving malice would be pretty hard.

Super downside? YouTube's takedown process is a precursor to official DMCA takedowns, so the DMCA punishment doesn't apply until a formal DMCA takedown is lodged.
I got a call once. They told me that basic Windows Services were viruses. They were determined to get remote access to my machine to "fix" things. It ended with the "supervisor" getting upset that I was wasting his time and asking me if I knew how to f--- myself.
Just like we have laws against discrimination based on disability and measures like handicap parking spots, does anyone envision a future where there's some sort of federal mandate that websites cater to the disabled?
98% Compression For Diagrams - Unbelievable?
Wow. All jokes aside, what made you try after the 2nd or 3rd stiffing?
10 Java Generics Interview Questions for Practice
The Top 35 Startup TechCrunch Missed out on this month
That second link is beautiful. Thanks!
"with 100% statistical confidence"

I'd love to know the sample size that gives you 100% statistical confidence.
You appear to be speaking from a purely consumer perspective. That's being only the client in a client/server relationship, and feeling a need for protection from the supplier.

I'm speaking from being a peer; both a consumer and a supplier at the same time. We are more than consumers, we're people and citizens that provide services and utilize services of others. Having a third party in those transactions that can arbitrarily disrupt them has proven problematic (for reference, see all of the backlash against PayPal for the way they arbitrarily freeze funds on both sides, etc).
Our startup, Selera Labs, is working on a product that sounds similar in some respects. We leverage elements of enterprise search and machine learning to provide continuous monitoring style analysis over ERP transactional data.

The human interaction component is something we have been very focused on. We support human annotations (tagging and workflow) over machine generated results that allow us to tune analysis processing for false vs true positives. We've also devoted lots of effort into making the UX easy for business users to very quickly understand why a result (or exception) was generated.

http://dataignition.com
The number of users implies that if they have more users, they will be able to generate more revenue. I'm stating i don't know what their future plans for revenue generation are but, in the end, that's all that's gonna matter.
Nice, if you put an IR sensor on both sides then you can easily bias it (and not do anything if both are active - manual unlock is fine in that case)

Sunlight will be an issue though...maybe IR and ultrasonic?
Which Scaling Metric Should Your Startup Focus On?
I was naive. I still had faith in common human decency.
A tractor is useful to a person just from buying it… app.net is only useful to a person if enough other people also buy it.

Your vehicle analogy completely falls apart and really on Hacker News do we have to simplify tech products down to car analogies…
I think the key, just like any career, is to truly make an effort to reduce your cost of living (yes even with dependents, or what I like to call barnacles). This will help you get the stress under control and free you up to be a little pickier with the projects / products you work on and the people you work with.

Still happily coding away @ 37 here.
I was trying to unload my bitcoins and found various vendors to spend it on. Not so weird.
Show HN: Get Maid - Uber for Maid Service in NYC
ok great. but will you read the damn book already?!?!

;)
I got one call... Soon as he said he was from Windows support, I laughed, said get lost man, and hung up.
HD CCTV - Safeguard against crime, or end of democracy?
Are you seriously trying to give unsolicited advice to the young here? Have the years taught you nothing? ;)
I tried reading it a few times and never made it more than 1/3 of the way through. I kept losing my place because it all sounded the same.
He Pud! Always thought it was a damned shame you didn't continue fuckedcompany.com through the next crisis(es). Why was that? It was great fun reading that (and seeing pr0n stars with tight fuckedcompany t-shirts).
IOS iPhone iPod iPad les bons plans du jour
You need to remove the stop words before visualizing them. Words such as 'the' 'and' etc don't need to be in the analysis
VWO rounds off 99.9x% to 100%. Sample size was 3500 visitors approximately to control and variation each.